Data storage media have been introduced onto which data may be written only once but read many times. Such media is referred to as Write-Once, Read Many, or WORM for short. The advantages of such media are many fold, and include the ability to enhance enforcement of copyrights.
In part because legal rights are involved with WORM media, government regulations have arisen that are related to WORM media. Non-compliance with applicable regulations may incur severe penalty under some of the rules.
In greater detail, so-called physical WORM, or “P-WORM”, has been proposed in which WORM requirements are imposed by the physical characteristics of the media. Among P-WORM media are optical disks. Another potential type of WORM might be software WORM, or “S-WORM”, in which WORM requirements are imposed through software interlocks.
As critically recognized herein, existing P-WORM systems which, recall, use optical media, are having trouble keeping pace with current performance and capacity requirements for storing regulated data. Magnetic disks could solve this problem by storing data on rewritable magnetic disks, which have good performance in terms of speed and capacity, but as understood herein implementing WORM safeguards in such systems, absent the present invention, would require exclusive reliance on S-WORM, which has the drawback of being a weaker WORM guarantee than P-WORM. With this critical recognition in mind, the invention herein is provided.